WHISTLER DAY 7-January 13 : Page Seven

“With a foot of new snow from the night before, [Skiing photographer] Eric Berger’s morning was interrupted when he had to take aerial photos of the Peak-to-Peak gondola for Whistler-Blackcomb’s marketing department. But afterward, Berger and skier Austin Ross were allowed to get a heli-drop at a location of their choice. ‘It was one of the best days of the season,’ Berger says. ‘The sky cleared just before we got out there.’”

-Skiing Magazine page 3, January 2010.

...And then God reached down from the heavens a week later and said, “Screw the good weather. Let the rain flow like beer on a college campus.”

Not that I am complaining. But you just never know what you’re going to get on a ski vacation.

My experience in the Canadian Coastal Mountains was far different than the accounts in magazines, ski films, and others that have been there. It rained. The mercury climbed higher than 50 degrees, on the summit and in the valley. At other times, I sat frozen on a chairlift after being soaked with sheets of rain, only to go up a few hundred feet and be confronted with pelting winds and tiny ice particles.

Some locals would say that, “these conditions only happen twice a decade.” Some were apologetic to us once they realized how far we had traveled to be here. “It’s an El-Nino year,” some would say. The general consensus was that Whistler-Blackcomb was more like the accounts in Skiing magazine than those found in this Blog.

Yet, at times, the conditions were so perfect once you got off the lift that you would get the urge to keep skiing into that rainy abyss below...just because you wanted to see what the mountain would challenge you with next.

You see pictures of this mythical place. You see the rock faces, the wide-open snow fields, the coniferous trees, and the snow. None of the pictures justify standing in the middle of glacier settled in a canyon 6,500 feet above the sea.

You will see on TV the Olympians become masters of the Dave Murray Downhill in a few weeks. Alpine warriors going faster than cars on the freeway jumping distances half of a football field in length at a time. I challenged the trail in my own right, and of course, the mountain beat me. I had to stop for a breather on one of the last steep pitches before the finish area. You will see it. I did it. The weather was bad at times, but it is truly a spectacular place.

On my first trip to the summit of Whistler, I stood at the top of a steep rock face—un-skiable, no matter who you are—and looked down. 1,000 feet directly below me, skiers and snowboarders danced like Etch-A-Sketches making lines in the snowpack as they crawled down the bowl floor and into the treeline. Some of them danced to the Peak Chairlift that I had just rode up to this cold, windy and alien place. I looked straight ahead, and the panorama is overtaking. You loose the sense of safety. Nothing is guarding you from danger. You almost over compensate trying to balance yourself upright.

For me, this was a moment of triumph, and the continuation of my endless curiosity. When you stand on top of a peak, there are choices on how you get down. The trails are suggestions to your descent, but it’s up to you and your style, your interpretation of the terrain, to get yourself back to earth. Whistler Blackcomb marked the farthest west that I have ever been. It is the culmination of the pursuit for the new, the challenging, and the exciting. Something that never stops for a skier who goes out just to feel free.

“If you don’t do it now, you’ll be a year older when you do.”